The First Eagle
A Leaphorn & Chee Navajo Tribal Police Mystery
Tony Hillerman
Since I began my fictional relationship with the Navajo Tribal Police, six of its officers have been killed while performing their duty. A small force covering a vast expanse of mountains, canyons, and desert, they must work primarily alone. In case of danger help is often hours away even if their radio calls for backup are heard. I dedicate this work to these six officers and their families. They gave their lives in defense of their people.
Burton Begay, Tuba City, 1975 Loren Whitehat, Tuba City, 1979 Andy Begay, Kayenta, 1987 Roy Lee Stanley, Kayenta, 1987 Hoskie Gene Jr., Kayenta, 1995 Samuel Redhouse, Crownpoint,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All characters in this work are fictional. Especially let it be known that Pamela J. Reynolds and Ted L. Brown, vector control specialists of the New Mexico Department of Public Health, did not model for the two vector control characters in
Chapter One
THE BODY OF ANDERSON NEZ lay under a sheet on the gurney, waiting.
From the viewpoint of Shirley Ahkeali, sitting at her desk in the Intensive Care Unit nursing station of the Northern Arizona Medical Center in Flagstaff, the white shape formed by the corpse of Mr. Nez reminded her of Sleeping Ute Mountain as seen from her aunt's hogan near Teec Nos Pos. Nez's feet, only a couple of yards from her eyes, pushed the sheet up to form the mountain's peak. Perspective caused the rest of the sheet to slope away in humps and ridges, as the mountain seemed to do under its winter snow when she was a child. Shirley had given up on finishing her night shift paperwork. Her mind kept drifting away to what had happened to Mr. Nez and trying to calculate whether he fit into the Bitter Water clan Nez family with the grazing lease adjoining her grandmother's place at Short Mountain. And then there was the question of whether his family would allow an autopsy. She remembered them as sheep camp traditionals, but Dr. Woody, the one who'd brought Nez in, insisted he had the family's permission.
At that moment Dr. Woody was looking at his watch, a black plastic digital job that obviously hadn't been bought to impress the sort of people who are impressed by expensive watches.
'Now,' Woody said, 'I need to know the time the man died.'
'It was early this morning,' Dr. Delano said, looking surprised. It surprised Shirley, too, because Woody already knew the answer.
'No. No. No,' Woody said. 'I mean exactly when.'
'Probably about two A.M.,' Dr. Delano said, with his expression saying that he wasn't used to being addressed in that impatient tone. He shrugged. 'Something like that.'
Woody shook his head, grimaced. 'Who would know? I mean, who would know within a few minutes?' He looked up and down the hospital corridor, then pointed at Shirley. 'Surely somebody would be on duty. The man was terminal. I know the time he was infected, and the time he began registering a fever. Now I need to know how fast it killed him. I need every bit of information I can get on processes in that terminal period. What was happening with various vital functions? I need all that data I ordered kept when I checked him in. Everything.'
Odd, Shirley thought. If Woody knew all that, why hadn't Nez been brought to the hospital while there was still some hope of saving him? When Nez was brought in yesterday he was burning with fever and dying fast.
'I'm sure it's all there,' Delano said, nodding toward the clipboard Woody was holding. 'You'll find it there in his chart.'
Now Shirley grimaced. All that information wasn't in Nez's chart. Not yet. It should have been, and would have been even on this unusually hectic shift if Woody hadn't rushed in demanding an autopsy, and not just an autopsy but a lot of special stuff. And that had caused Delano to be summoned, looking sleepy and out of sorts, in his role as assistant medical superintendent, and Delano to call in Dr. Howe, who had handled the Nez case in ICU. Howe, she noticed, wasn't letting Woody bother him. He was too old a hand for that. Howe took every case as his personal mano-a-mano battle against death. But when death won, as it often did in ICU units, he racked up a loss and forgot it. A few hours ago he had worried about Nez, hovered over him. Now he was simply another of the battles he'd been fated to lose.
So why was Dr. Woody causing all this excitement? Why did Woody insist on the autopsy? And insist on sitting in on it with the pathologist? The cause of death was clearly the plague. Nez had been sent to the Intensive Care Unit on admission. Even then the infected lymph glands were swollen, and subcutaneous hemorrhages were forming their splotches on his abdomen and legs, the discolorations that had given the disease its 'Black Death' name when it swept through Europe in the Middle Ages, killing tens of millions.
Like most medical personnel in the Four Corners country, Shirley Ahkeah had seen Black Death before. There'd been no cases on the Big Reservation for three or four years, but there were three already this year. One of the others had been on the New Mexico side of the Rez and hadn't come here. But it, too, had been fatal, and the word was that this was a vintage year for the old-fashioned bacteria—that it had flared up in an unusually virulent form.
It certainly had been virulent with Nez. The disease had gone quickly from the common glandular form into plague pneumonia. The Nez sputum, as well as his blood, swarmed with the bacteria, and no one went into his
